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Snapchat Lets Users See How They Rank with Friends

A Snapchat feature lets paying users see their position in their friends’ digital orbits. For some teens, whose friends are everything, it’s adding to their anxiety.

Snapchat+ subscribers can check where they rank with a particular friend based on how often that friend communicates with them. The result is automatically rendered in a solar-system metaphor: Are you Mercury, the planet closest to your friend? Great! Uranus? Bad sign.

“A lot of kids my age have trouble differentiating best friends on Snapchat from actual best friends in real life,” says 15-year-old Callie Schietinger. She said she had her own problems when a boyfriend noticed that he was Neptune in her solar system. He asked who held the Mercury position and when she told him it was a guy friend, he got mad.

More than 20 million U.S. teens use the app, though most don’t pay for Snapchat+. Young adults with those paid accounts have seen friendships splinter and young love wither due to the knowledge that someone else ranks higher on the app. Now, lawmakers, doctors, and parents are giving fuller attention to these apps and how they broadly affect kids’ mental health.

Callie and her boyfriend have since broken up, for other reasons. But that stress and the misunderstandings she has seen other friends experience have soured her on the feature. “It’s everyone’s biggest fear put onto an app,” Callie says. “Ranking is never good for anyone’s head.”

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